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When Xerxes saw from Therma the very great height of the Thessalian mountains Olympus and Ossa and learned that the Peneus flows through them in a narrow pass, which was the way that led into Thessaly, he desired to view the mouth of the Peneus because he intended to march by the upper road through the highland people of Macedonia to the country of the Perrhaebi and the town of Gonnus;1 this, it was told him, was the safest way.

1 Xerxes' army might have entered Thessaly by marching along the coast between Olympus and the sea, and up the Peneus valley (the pass of Tempe) to Gonnus. Instead, it crossed the mountains; probably both by a route which runs across the southern slope of Olympus to Gonnus, and also by the Petra pass, further inland, between Olympus and Bermius. But Herodotus is mistaken in making the ἄνω ὁδός alone reach Gonnus; the Tempe route would have done the same.

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